The African Slave Trade and Slavery

Blind Spots in French Thought

Translated by Mary O'Neill

Françoise Vergès

The current
debates in France on what are known as the “memorial” laws, on “repentance” and
the “colonial past” have in a strange way rearticulated the frame of discussion
of what underlies the theme of this seminar[1]:
to what extent has the colony determined the way the world has been organized
(“determine” in the sense of shaping political, cultural, economical and legal
developments)? There is profound disagreement about how France’s colonial past
should be dealt with both during the era of slavery and afterwards. There are
two conflicting interpretations of history. One claims to have scientific
“truth” as its goal and relies on the researcher’s “autonomy”. It draws a clear
boundary between memory and history, where memory is subject to
reinterpretation and belongs to the world of subjectivity and emotion, while
history is written in the tranquillity of the archives, far from the noise of
the outside world. This interpretation of history displays little interest in
the conditions which have produced it, and arguments for the researcher’s
autonomy and the separation of memory from history are a total rejection of the
work of the past thirty years; the methodology which privileges the social and
economic over the cultural and political (a vestige of orthodox Marxism) is one
of its sub-chapters. Ideologically driven, defending a specific idea of the
Republic, it clearly illustrates the methodological and critical impasse in
which events such as colonial conquest, colonialism and national struggles for
liberation have been locked for a very long time in France.

The second
interpretation of history seeks to understand the conditions of its production,
prioritizes reciprocal readings and perspectives, is interested in archives
other than the ones stamped “official archives”. It acknowledges that the very
act of historical interpretation is contentious ground, where divergent
interests clash and where the “truth” is the result of a process of negotiation
which is subject to the test of time, the discovery of new archives and the
shifting of paradigms. It draws its inspiration from the entire corpus of
postcolonial studies, and from strands of critical theory in philosophy,
history and anthropology represented by the terms ‘post-structuralism’ and
‘postmodernism’.

The opposition
between two interpretations of history is not new: it emerged as the histories
of women, workers and subalterns in the narratives of national struggles for
independence were recorded. It has reappeared quite violently in the context of
demands for a critical revision of the French national narrative. These demands
have been articulated by groups who want to reinstate the history of the slave
trade, of slavery, of their abolition and that of colonialism within the French
national narrative and within the creation of modernity. Such a resurgence
warrants further investigation so that we might better understand it.

What is at stake
however is not simply a demand for “minor histories” to be considered, for
history to be democratized in a “multicultural” way or for histories to be played off against History. My feeling is that today we are witnessing a campaign to
delegitimize these emerging voices, a campaign which is being waged by a number
of academics with significant connections in the press and the publishing
world. I view this campaign as more than a methodological dispute. I see it is
as the attempted refusal to understand how and why a blind spot has developed
in French thought, how and why the colonial issue (during the era of slavery
and afterwards) provokes a type of blockage in the national consciousness.
There is no conspiracy, but there is
conflict – conflict over an approach to politics, over an approach to conflict.
There is no conspiracy – books are published, research is undertaken – but
there is a divergence between ways of articulating what the colony was and what
it is now in the post-colonial era. There is no conspiracy, but there is
disagreement.

By disagreement, I
am referring to how exactly we understand the interpretation of history and how
we conceptualize notions such as citizenship, nation, colony, decolonization,
struggles for independence... The way these concepts are articulated, the
actual process of conceptualization,
is the specific subject of historical research. Analysing what constitutes the
colony as a space outside the national territory and, as part of the same
process, analysing decolonization, sheds light on the way in which this space
is conceptualized, produced. Postcolonial
theory invites us to “problematize the boundaries
that organize historians’ mental maps”.[2]
These boundaries are rarely questioned, thus revealing a cultural nationalism
that makes it easy to neglect space-times and more specifically the space-time
of the colony. The order of discourse and
of silences organizes the historical field: take for example the silence in
18th-century narratives surrounding the Haitian Revolution.[3]2 But postcolonial theory also advocates
a healthy scepticism about the viability of retrieving the voices of subalterns
in the colonial or national archives.

A series of recent publications – Daniel Lefeuvre, Pour en finir avec la repentance coloniale, 2006, Romain
Bertrand, Mémoires d’empire. La
controverse autour du ‘fait colonial’, 2006, René Rémond, Quand l’Etat se mêle de l’histoire,
2006, Pascal Bruckner, La Tyrannie de la
repentance, 2006, Jean-Pierre Rioux, La
France perd la mémoire. Comment un pays démissionne de son histoire, 2006 – as well as special reports in weekly magazines and
specialist journals, round-table discussions on television and radio have
reconfigured the field of research, trying to conceal the political conflict by
staging a methodological one instead. On one side, you have researchers driven
by “topical issues” and the pressure of “memorial” groups; on the other, there
are independent researchers concerned to establish the truth. The greater good
of the Nation seemingly requires this history to remain in the silence of the
archives for historians to deal with, since they alone are capable of
disentangling the course of events. This campaign to delegitimize and discredit research along with those
engaged in it also relies on the marked opposition that supposedly exists
between memory and history. Memory is located in the realm of the subjective,
the unimagined, the hysterical, the irrational, the spoken word; history on the
other hand occupies the realm of Reason, the objective, the written archive.

This type of
methodological detachment can only be understood if we examine the cultural,
social and political implications at the root of the current debate. In fact,
what is really at issue is the slave trade, slavery and colonial conquest -- referred
to as “colonization”, a shift in meaning which I will return to -- all of which
we would like to think of as belonging well and truly to the past.
Psychological advice (Rioux and Remond say we need to let go) and political
advice (Bertrand and Lejeune say we’re forgetting the social aspect) also play
their part in delegitimizing an entire series of interventions, writing them
off as the results of an unease or a blindness.

So it would seem
that these interventions have no legitimacy and a campaign is launched to
maintain an interpretation of history that seeks to preserve an image of France
to guarantee national unity (a national conception of history shared by Left
and Right alike). In this narrative, the entire colonial experience is part of
a linear progression in which history is apparently divided into “pages of
light and shadow”, a meaningless expression that transforms it into a landscape
darkened by occasional patches of cloud. But these shadowy areas, to pursue the
metaphor a little further, are inhabited not just by the ghosts of the dead but
by the living as well. They are not empty spaces where a little light is all it
takes to liven up the landscape. These ghosts and living beings do not exist
“outside” the national territory; they are just as entitled to live there as
those who declare themselves official citizens. It will not be enough simply to
expose these shadowy areas to the light: we need to understand how they have
been constituted, how and why their inhabitants came to live there, how and why
their inhabitants have got to a point where they are demanding the right to
return to the metropolis, or to build a new one.

The slave inhabits
this shadowy area, a ghost forever consigned to the past and denied a presence
in the French nation. Yet the slave haunts the very foundations on which France
has been constructed. I don’t wish in today’s discussion to go back over the
way the declaration of the rights of man and those of the citizen has been
racialized, a process which has qualified the “all men are born free and equal
before the law” clause with a silent “except for a few” detail. We are expected
to believe that the qualifying “except for a few” is the responsibility of a
handful of colonists who choose in this way to stand aloof from the nation as a
whole. This separation between civilized white men living in Metropolitan
France, “decivilized” white men living in the colonies and the “natives” –
those inferior beings by definition excluded from the community of equals -- is
already apparent under slavery and continues to flourish in the colony of the
post-slavery era. Pierre Nora’s book, Les
Français d’Algérie, illustrates this compartmentalization into groups
through the use of a vocabulary referring to those most closely associated with
progress and those at the furthest remove from it. French political
perspectives continue to be haunted by the colonial vocabulary of the
Republic’s civilizing mission.

Demarcation of
territoriality forms the basis of the Nation-State: the boundaries have to be
drawn. Here we have citizens; there, foreigners. Within this territory, French
citizens have rights and the national narrative is written. Citizenship,
national narrative and territoriality are interconnected. Now the colony, both
during and after the era of slavery, has been consigned to the realm of
extraterritoriality, outside the jurisdiction of the nation and, by the same
token, the victims of slavery and colonialism have been expelled from the
“territory of rights”. Hannah Arendt had referred to this phenomenon in her
book on totalitarianism, and her theories have paved the way for an entire
corpus of work by people like Achille Mbembe, Ann Laura Stoler, Edward Saïd,
Michel Foucault, or Saskia Sassen. They all demonstrate the impossibility of understanding
the present if we do not examine the complex and contentious history of rights
and their territoriality. Membership of a political community is never granted
as a matter of course.

The history of the
overseas territories is still not part of national history; it exists at the
margins, as an additional note. Slavery is a chapter in this history. It is so
firmly consigned to the past that, in the current debate on the Taubira law,
there is the strong suggestion that the desire to study the history of slavery
may well be legitimate, but the desire to commemorate it points to a neurotic
attachment to the past, even a confusing of past and present, and a desire to
manipulate history. Such claims show no understanding whatsoever of that
history. They also deliberately neglect, for revisionist purposes, scholarly
contributions that enhance our knowledge and are campaigning for scientific
research.

So all those
historians who attack the Taubira law choose to ignore the report by the
Committee for the Commemoration of Slavery, available online since May 2005 and
published as a book at the end of 2005. They repeatedly raise the issue of the
demands made in early 2005 by the Comité
des Antillais, Guyanais et Réunionnais*
for legal proceedings to be brought against Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau, author
of Les traites négrières, published
by Gallimard. Immediately hailed by the critics and awarded several prizes, the
book has been lauded ever since as “a work unanimously praised by
[Pétré-Grenouilleau’s] peers” as soon as it is mentioned and has been
repeatedly endorsed as a result. (The case was withdrawn at the beginning of
2006). While I in no way agree with this type of indictment and want to analyse
the conditions allowing a juridicization of history to develop, I am also
interested in the manner in which the history of this incident has been
recorded and the way it has since become established as “truth”. This mirror
effect, by which a “communitarian” association fuels the historians’ righteous
indignation, has prevented any critical reading of the book, which after all
deserved it. All the more so since a reading of Lord Hugh Thomas’s book La Traite des Noirs, finally translated
in 2006, allows Pétré-Grenouilleau’s work to be put in its proper place in the
long historiography of the transatlantic slave trade. Once again, it is a
matter of understanding how a field of legitimation has been constructed around
the colonial past, then examining the conditions of its production.

In official French
historiography, the end of colonial slavery is presented as an inevitable point
in history when France finally fulfils her role as the birthplace of human
rights. The French abolitionists play a central role in this teleological
narrative, where everything is organized according to a script whose political
consequences are only now becoming apparent. In 1848, France turns its back on
its pro-slavery past. In the interests of a national narrative in which France
must not lose face, an entire segment of history is swept aside in this way.

Now the conversion
of slavery into a history which took shape “over there”, “overseas”, without
any connection with France’s national history has induced in many historians
and sociologists a certain blindness to the emergence of cultural and social
demands currently being articulated in public debate. The conception of two
temporalities and two spaces, which are supposedly mutually exclusive, joins a
territorialized conception of national history; its geography is one whose
borders date back to the 18th century. The national narrative
respects the territory and geographical boundaries of the kingdoms and
revolutionary wars of Europe, but never those of “overseas France”. It is one
of the reasons why the colonial is omitted from the national, indeed
systematically excluded from it. Let me be absolutely clear on this point: the colony is present, it is the bonds
between the colonial and the national which are marginalized.

Taking these
comments as our point of departure, we cannot speak of the colonial (both
during and after the era of slavery) and the postcolonial (greatly
misunderstood in France) without acknowledging the need to draw these
narratives and perspectives together and have them intersect. To quote Homi
Bhabha, “the tangible legacy of this suppressed history is the return to the
French metropolis of her former colonized subjects. Their actual presence
transforms the politics, cultural ideologies and intellectual traditions of
Metropolitan France: having suffered the experience of colonization, they upset
some of the metropolitan centre’s great narratives on progress and public
order, and they challenge the authority and authenticity of these narratives”.[4]

This perspective
is by no means a shared one and is even perceived as a threat to the republic
or the class struggle. According to the historian Daniel Lefeuvre, the
“Repentants” – a sort of sect eluding precise definition -- consign “France’s
social divide to the scrapheap”, forget “the class struggle” and use the
colonial past as the only analytical grid through which to read the present.[5]
The cost-benefit argument on which Lefeuvre relies heavily to expose the
weakness in the Repentants’ position is in fact a counter-argument which does
more to undermine his own demonstration, something he fails to grasp. He argues
that the colony contributed nothing to France in economic terms, that it was
indeed more of a financial burden. “It could be argued,” writes Lefeuvre,
quoting the economist Paul Bairoch, “that the colonial enterprise damaged
France’s economic development far more than it benefited it.”[6]
So France gained nothing from the colonies and, if her armies committed a few
atrocities, the progress she brought about swiftly compensated for them.[7]
Now if France has gained nothing economically from the colonies (which is
highly debatable), it’s precisely because she profited from colonialism in other ways; the advantages she gained
were as much psychological, cultural and political as they were economic.

In his book La France perd la mémoire, Jean-Pierre
Rioux presents another analysis of the phenomenon. “The divide or the hiatus,”
he writes, “that we experience today on the subject of colonization and slavery
within the French collective memory is the product of lapses in the memory of Metropolitan
France, memory lapses too on the part of the victims’ descendants. The memories
summoned up by these topics are often confused and disparate, sometimes
reconstructed, always exacting and even vindictive, but they do not add up to a
memory.”[8] While he
acknowledges that the descendants of slaves can legitimately demand the right
“to assert their collective pride; to proclaim the communal warmth they long
for or wish to retrieve; to debate the increased social and cultural autonomy
which the republic could grant them”, Rioux still draws the conclusion that “it
is unnecessary for precedence to be given to a past which we should in fact be
thinking of laying to rest some day.” Such precedence is dangerous because the
“colonial past is an argument and a “cloak” which can be used to undermine the
host country or its nationality.”[9]
Rieux contests the use of the past as a means to explain the present, but this
questioning is a “cloak” (to reuse the term) which hides the development of
another argument. That argument is designed to construct a narrative in which
the excesses are openly acknowledged in order to play down their consequences
just as swiftly. Slavery should certainly
be condemned; still, it must be said that the Africans and the Muslims were
responsible for far worse! Is that a crime against humanity? Can one
justifiably talk about a past from which there are no survivors? Certainly atrocities were carried out in
the colony, but once they had receded into the past, didn’t colonization bring
progress?

The vocabulary of
the colonial ideal of education, of an inherent goodness in the colonizing
mission had convinced the colonizer of his superiority. His language was the
language of civilization and order. But the colonized couldn’t resist using
irony or ridicule to turn the colonizer’s own language against him, exposing
its limits, its gaps and its dark side to him. The long history of colonial
monolingualism, aloof from of all contact with other languages and rejecting
creolization, should not obscure the history of appropriation and
transformation of the Other’s language by the slave, the colonized. Nor should
it obscure the history of how words meaning liberty and equality were
translated in the colonial context.

What did the slave
and the colonized make of the French they heard? They understood it the way a
foreigner in the process of forging his own language, Creole, understood it;
they appropriated French to turn the oppressor’s own words against him, showing
him just how much his actions contradicted his principles, his vocabulary and
his claim to universality. The slavery laws allowed a slave’s tongue to be
ripped out as a punishment; he could be gagged, muzzled, forbidden to speak
publicly. Clearly, he could not be permitted to speak since he would
undoubtedly have cursed his master and denounced the abuse. Yet slaves and
colonized alike would in time take possession of the French language and
“denationalize” it. French has become a transcontinental, transnational,
deracialized language rejecting any linkage between language and the right to
citizenship. It is not simply a matter of “tropicalizing” terms but of
reclaiming them and freeing them from the ethnicization which colonial
discourse imposes by creating analogies between “White” and “free”, “White” and
“citizen”.

The colonized have
seized the vocabulary of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment in order
to attack the outrageous privileges of the wealthy. The colonized use the
republican vocabulary by denationalizing
it, giving it back its universal character. But today, the republican ideal is
somewhat threadbare. It hasn’t delivered on its promises; above all, its
limitations are once again obvious in the light of recent social, economic and
cultural changes. There is still this love of principles and contempt for
pragmatism, this abstract universalism and suspicion of difference.

[3] On this topic, see also
Françoise Vergès, La Mémoire enchaînée.
Questions sur l’esclavage. Paris : Albin Michel, 2006 and Michel Rolph
Trouillot, Silencing the Past. Power and
the Production of History. New York: Beacon Press, 1995.

*Tr.’s Note: organization representing the interests of citizens originally
from French overseas territories.